Quotes About Rationalism

Liberalism is a most important by-product of Rationalism, and its origins and ideology must be clearly shown.

Rationalism pervades the progressive world. It is one of the reasons progressives have lately been losing to conservatives. Rationalist-based political campaigns miss the symbolic, metaphorical, moral, emotional, and frame-based aspects of political campaigns.

Rationalism and Newtonian science has lured us into dark woods, but a new metaphysics can rescue us.

We need to break free of the rationalism constraining our politics over the last few decades; such rationalism is too narrow to adequately describe our real problems or to adequately address them.

Writing is a compensatory activity, and literature abounds in cases like his. Borges's pages teem with knives, crimes, and scenes of torture, but the cruelty is kept at a distance by his fine sense of irony and by the cool rationalism of his prose, which never falls into sensationalism or the purely emotional. This lends a statuesque quality to the physical horror, giving it the nature of a work of art set in an unreal world.

All rationalism tends to minimalise the value and the importance of life and to decrease the sum total of human happiness.

unlike previous councils that had to deal with one or two specific heresies, this council had to face a more comprehensive problem: the very foundations of faith had been shaken and put into mortal jeopardy. Rationalism, materialism, religious indifference, and, most generally, denial of the spiritual dimension of human life figured large in the problems to be dealt with.

We never follow the consistent rationalist for long; once we pluck out his mystery and know where he is headed, we abandon him to his system

This was the Evangelical Revival that now began to take hold on the propertied class, who, frightened by what was happening in France, were anxiously mending their fences, spiritual as well as political. To escape rationalism's horrid daughter, revolution, they were only too willing to be enfolded in the anti-intellectual embrace of Evangelicalism, even if it demanded faith and good works and a willing suspension of disbelief.

Baruch Spinoza

Traditionally, open-minded secular liberal rationalists have not made a case for tolerance.

Rationalism is the idea that we can ever understand anything about the state of being. It's a deathtrip. It always has been. . . . And if rationalism is a deathtrip, then irrationalism might very well be a lifetrip . . . at least until it proves otherwise.

You doom yourselves, Susannah. You seem positively bent on it, and the root is always the same: your faith fails you, and you replace it with rational thought. But there is no love in thought, nothing that lasts in deduction, only death in rationalism.

America in the twenty-first century has generally returned to the worldview of the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment rationalists, who were so appalled at the religious wars of the previous century that they recoiled from all religion, unable to fathom a world in which religion and freedom could be mutually supporting.

As the power of Christianity declined through the centuries that have followed the Reformation, Calvinism played a less and less important part, while the new philosophies of mechanism and rationalism correspondingly increased.

Spinoza is, for me, the 'prince' of philosophers.

It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.

Without the withering criticism by nominalism, medieval Christian philosophy and theology would not have relinquished their claim to the role of knowledge in discovering the nature of things in light of higher principles; instead, it caused them to leave the field of battle without any defense before the onslaught of secularism, rationalism, and empiricism, which were, as a result, able to gain a remarkably easy victory.

I am putting together a secular bible. My Genesis is when the apple falls on Newton's head.

Después de todo, nuestras grandes teorías racionalistas -fascistas, pongamos por caso, o comunistas- han demostrado su inutilidad esencial en el espacio de unas pocas generaciones, a pesar de su naturaleza intelectualmente atractiva.

rationalism is a form of intellectual bigotry which, in thinking about reality, tries to take it into account as little as possible.

La idea del principio en Leibniz ? la evolución de la teoría deductiva.

What if depression – reason's failure to achieve self-mastery – is not the failure of reason but instead the result of reason? What if human reason works "too well," and brings us to conclusions that are anathema to the existence of human beings? What we would have is a "cold rationalism," shoring up the anthropocentric conceits of the philosophical endeavor, showing us an anonymous, faceless world impervious to our hopes and desires.

The Greek conception of a life in harmony with nature found its most complete development in the rationalism of the Renaissance and of the centuries that followed it.